Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Elizabeth Edwards, a popular figure
in the Democratic Party whose life was shaped by loss, first of
a teenage son, then of her husband’s two presidential campaigns,
then of a marriage torn by his infidelity, has died. She was 61.

She died today at her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
surrounded by friends and family including her estranged
husband, former Democratic U.S. Senator John Edwards, the
Associated Press reported, citing a statement from the family.
Throughout a six-year battle with breast cancer, she devoted
herself to raising son Jack, 10, and daughter Emma Claire, 12,
her two youngest children.

“In her life, Elizabeth Edwards knew tragedy and pain,”
President Barack Obama said in a statement. “Many others would
have turned inward; many others in the face of such adversity
would have given up. But through all that she endured, Elizabeth
revealed a kind of fortitude and grace that will long remain a
source of inspiration.”

Edwards endured cancer treatments while supporting her
husband’s bid -- against Obama, among others -- for the 2008
Democratic presidential nomination. Later, she concluded her
husband shouldn’t have run because of his 2006 affair with a
filmmaker traveling with his campaign. She separated from her
husband in January.

Her health was a sad footnote to two presidential
campaigns. She was diagnosed with breast cancer the day after
the 2004 general election, a Republican victory that spoiled her
husband’s chance to be vice president. In March 2007, during her
husband’s second campaign, doctors found the cancer had spread
to her bones and was incurable.

Days ‘Numbered’

“The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered,”
Edwards wrote on her Facebook page yesterday, after doctors
determined her cancer had metastasized to the liver. “We know
that.”

John Edwards’s affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter produced
a child, as well as an investigation, still open, of whether the
candidate and others improperly used campaign money to support
Hunter. The former North Carolina senator became a pariah in his
party, not least because of what it might have meant to
Democrats’ election chances had he won the nomination, only to
be exposed as unfaithful.

Along with sympathy, the affair drew some criticism of
Elizabeth as well, for permitting her husband to run for
president in 2008 while they jointly held such a potentially
explosive secret.

Fallout From Affair

In a 2009 book, “Resilience,” Edwards said she cried,
screamed and threw up when her husband admitted his affair. She
said both of them later realized “he should not have run.”
Asked in a television interview if they were still in love, she
replied, “You know, that’s a complicated question.”

Hunter, in a 2010 interview with GQ magazine, said the
Edwards marriage was troubled long before she entered the
picture. She said John was “emasculated” with fear of “the
wrath of Elizabeth.” Elizabeth Edwards said that wasn’t true.

Even before the infidelity issue was made public, Elizabeth
Edwards faced questions about whether campaigning with cancer in
2007 was the best course for the couple’s two youngest children,
then 8 and 6, who began traveling with their parents and
learning from tutors.

Edwards answered the critics in a 2007 addendum to “Saving
Graces,” her memoir.

“Our children learn something from our choice to live,”
she wrote. “They will have struggles, I know, struggles from
which I cannot protect them, struggles after I am gone. And when
they come, our children will remember how their family, how we,
chose to handle hardship. I want them to say, ‘We did not give
into hardship.’”

Navy Pilot’s Daughter

Mary Elizabeth Anania was born on July 3, 1949, at
Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida, where her father,
Vince, a Navy pilot, was based.

She and two younger siblings -- brother Jay and sister
Nancy -- grew up on the move as their father’s assignments took
the family to bases in Japan, Florida, Virginia and Maryland. It
was an upbringing familiar to Elizabeth’s mother, Mary, also a
Navy pilot’s daughter.

Edwards, known as Mary Beth, was president of her junior-year class at the Zama American High School in Japan.

At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, she
studied English and aspired “to teach young people to love
literature as I did.”

After two years of graduate study, unimpressed with the job
prospects for an English Ph.D., she changed course and applied
to the university’s law school. “My mother had always wanted me
to go; she said I was argumentative,” Edwards wrote.

First Date

A friend persuaded her to accept a date with a fellow law
student, John Edwards. A small-town boy, he considered Elizabeth
to be the classmate with “the blackest hair and fine light blue
eyes” whose poised, intelligent performance in class was
“further evidence that I was way out of my league in the
Carolina School of Law,” he recalled in his memoir, “Four
Trials.”

Their date -- dancing to a disc jockey at a Holiday Inn --
was mostly forgettable, Elizabeth later wrote. But at the door
to her apartment, John kissed her on the forehead and said
goodnight, a “sweet and tender gesture” that won her heart.

They married on July 30, 1977, and eventually settled in
Raleigh, where they began raising a family as John became a
successful and wealthy plaintiff’s attorney.

Son’s Death

In April 1996, their 16-year-old son, Wade, was killed when
his Jeep Grand Cherokee fishtailed and flipped on a wind-swept
stretch of highway. His parents, along with their daughter,
Cate, channeled their pain into creating a computer lab next to
Wade’s high school in Raleigh. John launched the Senate bid he
had considered for a few years, defeating Republican Senator
Lauch Faircloth in 1998.

The couple also decided to have more children. In 1998, at
48, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter, Emma Claire. Two years
later, in 2000, she had a son, Jack. In her memoir, she
attributed her late-in-life pregnancies to hormone shots plus
“medications and good fortune.”

Elizabeth Edwards became a national figure when her husband
ran for president in 2004, fell short in his bid for the
Democratic nomination, then was selected by John Kerry as his
vice presidential running mate.

She said she came up with the scrappy phrase -- “We’ve
waited this long, we can wait a little bit longer” -- that
Edwards spoke in Boston’s Copley Square in the wee hours of the
morning after the election, hoping that Ohio would still swing
to the Democrats.

Concession Day

The Democrats conceded the election later that day.
Elizabeth Edwards went from Kerry’s concession speech to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston for a biopsy of a lump she had
found in her breast. Diagnosed with cancer, she underwent
surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Over the next few months she received tens of thousands of
supportive letters, plus 65,000 e-mails.

The cancer reappeared in one of her ribs in March 2007. She
underwent oral chemotherapy and received a monthly intravenous
bone strengthener, People magazine reported in July 2007.

She remained active and visible on the campaign trail until
her husband ended his campaign on Jan. 30, 2008, after losses in
the first four Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Health Care

After the campaign, Edwards joined the Center for American
Progress, a Democratic think tank, as a senior fellow on health-care policy. She testified before Congress in 2009 in favor of
overhauling the health-care system to help those who can’t
afford insurance.

“High deductibles and unrealistic copayment
responsibilities leave people with chronic illness at perpetual
risk of financial ruin,” she said. “Health insurance companies
are able to deny coverage to people with health problems,
exclude pre-existing conditions from coverage when they offer it
and charge unmanageable premiums. They can even rescind coverage
when their policyholders get sick.”

About her own resilience, Edwards told CNN’s Larry King in
August 2010: “I don’t think that I’m special in any way, but I
think most people do pull themselves together, do what it is
they need to be done. Sometimes you’re thrown for a loop for a
little while and then you start to reclaim.”

In her April 2010 afterword to “Resilience,” Edwards said
she hoped for eight more years, so that she could see her
youngest, Jack, graduate from high school and perhaps have Cate,
her oldest, give her a grandchild.

“And if I get there, I know I will want to live longer,
that I will ask for more -- who wouldn’t? -- but right now I
want to live for eight more years, to finish the one job I know
I did better than any other.”